We reprint below some
excerpts, forwarded by Andy Pollack, from October 16 news reports giving more
information about an incident in Iraq
on Wednesday, October 13, when a platoon of U.S. supply
troops refused a suicide mission. See “As Million Worker March Gathers, GI
Opposition to Iraq War Grows”
on the Labor Standard web site, the section with the subhead “Platoon Defies
Order in Iraq.”

The American Establishment finally
decided it had to end the illegal, immoral war in Vietnam
when entire units of the U.S.
military began to refuse to fight. Sometimes insubordination was open, with men
refusing to stir from their camps. Other times it was more subtle, with patrols
making much noise, essentially announcing to their Vietnamese opponents that
they were present, as if to say, “If you leave us alone, we won’t bother you.”
In the face of such plummeting morale and discipline, the decision had to be
made to finally bring the troops home.

That’s not the situation in Iraq–not
yet. But alarm bells were set off this week. A 17-member Army Reserve platoon
was arrested for refusing a “suicide mission” to deliver fuel. The platoon has
troops from Alabama, Kentucky,
North Carolina, Mississippi,
and South Carolina.
The reaction back home in their communities was of overwhelming sympathy.

It appears the Army brass hats are
going to back off from confrontation with these GIs. They hope this is an
isolated incident that will be quickly forgotten. But their past optimism about
operations in Iraq
has not always been justified. If this war drags on-–as it almost certainly
will, regardless of the outcome of the election-–we can expect further
collective self-defense among men and women in the Army’s ranks.

These GIs are not cowards-–far from
it. It takes a lot of guts to defy orders from the brass. The GIs risk
imprisonment and dishonorable discharge. But they don’t like being victims.

We shouldn’t tolerate their
victimization either. Those who really want to support the troops should be
backing the efforts of US Labor Against the War, Veterans for Peace, and others who
demand that our sisters and brothers in uniform in Iraq
and Afghanistan
be brought home now!

In the following excerpts from a front-page article in the
October 16 New York Daily News, we
call special attention to the fact that the arrested GIs, who nowapparently have been released, were kept
under close guard and “treated like captured Iraqi insurgents”! Nadine
Stratford of Rock Hill, South Carolina, whose godson was one of those arrested,
said: “They won’t let them go to
sleep—and this is American soldiers that are holding them.”

Nadine
Stratford, of Rock Hill, whose godson Colin Durham is in the 343rd, said the
soldiers balked at being sent on a potentially deadly mission in unarmored fuel
trucks—and were now being treated like captured Iraqi insurgents. “They had
them in a trailer, and then they moved them to a tent,” she told the Daily News.
“They won’t let them go to sleep—and this is American soldiers that are holding
them.”

…Teresa Hill,
of Jackson, Miss., played a desperate message from her
daughter Amber McClenny in which McClenny
asked her to contact her congressman and “raise pure hell.”

“They are
holding us against our will,” McClenny, 21, said. “We
are now prisoners…I’m not even supposed to be using the phone.” McClenny said they were being asked to risk their lives in “broken-down
trucks” and without much of an armed military escort. She added that it was a
pointless mission because the fuel was contaminated—and military brass knew it.

“They knew
there was a 99% chance that they were going to get ambushed or fired at,” Hill
said. “They would have had no way to fight back.”

“It was like
a suicide mission and they said it was unsafe for them to go over there,” Stratford added. “I don’t
know why they would do this, why they would send them kids over there and put them
in that kind of situation.”

“When my
husband refuses to follow an order, it has to be something major,” Butler told the Clarion-Ledger,
a Jackson
newspaper.

From the Oct. 16 New York
Times:

The incident…was
first reported in The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson,
Miss., where several of the
soldiers live. [It] apparently began after the company tried to deliver a
shipment of fuel to a base, but was turned away because the fuel was unusable, according
to family members.

“We were carrying contaminated fuel.”

After the
soldiers were released, Specialist McClenny called her
mother again and explained that the jet fuel the convoy had to carry had been
contaminated with diesel, and that because it had been
rejected by one base, it would likely be rejected by the Taji
base. Taji is in the volatile Sunni-dominated swath
of Iraq, and Ms. Hill said her daughter felt “that if you go there, it’s a 99
percent chance you will be ambushed or fired upon. “They had not slept, the
trucks had not been maintained, they were going without armed guards, it was
just a bad deal,” Ms. Hill said. “And that’s when the whole unit said no.” She
said their defense is “cease action on an unsafe order.”

Relatives
said that prior to the incident, soldiers had complained to them that their
equipment was shoddy and put them in greater danger. The relatives said they did
not know if such complaints were made to the unit’s command.

[One military
expert was quoted as follows:]

“The paradigm
shift that’s happening is that a truck driver is just as likely to see combat
as soldiers in infantry units…There’s better training now of support units now
as they go out. They’ve gotten better about equipping support units, but those
moves have still been incremental moves. There hasn’t been a wholesale push to
change the Army to face the kind of threat it faces in Iraq today.
There are no rear units in Iraq
any more.”